AUSTRALIA has been warned it can no longer hide behind its powerful allies and must become independently capable if it’s to deal with Chinese aggression.
Federal Senator and former Australian Army Major General Jim Molan said Australia needed to change its mindset and contribute “healthily” to its own defence.
Senator Molan was speaking yesterday to Sky News anchor Rita Panahi regarding the importance of Australia’s Five Eyes, Quad and other bilateral alliances.
HIDE
“Five Eyes forms the basis of our alliance, we work extraordinarily well together and we are equal partners,” Senator Molan said.
“The only thing that worries me about putting these alliances together, is that all of a sudden we start thinking we’ll hide behind the alliance – instead of being a part of it,” he said.
“We’ve done that for 75 years in relation to the American alliance. We need to be independently strong, we need to be self-reliant and then we can contribute healthily to any alliance that may arise.”
Five Eyes is a well-established alliance between Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada and Britain which originally formed as an intelligence sharing coalition, however, has grown to incorporate shared economic and military interests.
The Quad is a more recent organisation between Australia, the US, Japan and India and exists mainly to temper Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region.
Senator Molan said Australia should also work with other regional nations including Vietnam and Indonesia, to name a few.
He said Australia, regardless of its limited population, needed to view itself as a regional economic and military superpower.
“If Israel can exist and become secure after having fought any number of successful wars, with a total population of 6m Jews and 2m Arabs then, if we are serious, of course we can defend ourselves and be self-reliant,” he said.
“At the moment we elect not to.”
WEAKER
Senator Molan said Australia could no longer depend on the United States.
“We can’t expect it to come and rescue all its allies in the way that it has over the past 75 years,” he said
“The American military is 30 to 50 per cent weaker than it was at the end of the Cold War. This is something we need to get into our brain and never forget.” PC
General Molan makes more sense than the Greens and Labor combined.
It’s a shame he wasn’t promoted into cabinet in the last government re-shuffle.